Any tips for pringing very small parts?

[Sabbath]

Hi All, if i'm not concerned about print time or filament use, how would i optimize for print quality? Is slower always better? Is lower layer height always better? At what point when lowering speed and height to you do the returns become negligible?

Temperature recommendation for ABS? (using 245 deg Celcius at the moment).

[curious aardvark]

well low layer heights arn't necessarily a good thing. I pretty much only go down to 0.2 mm anyway.
Slower printing though is necessary for small parts as is active cooling. It also helps to print more than one piece at a time, to give more cooling time between parts.

Smallest things I've made to date are 5mm 8 toothed gears and 3mm rubber tires.
The gears were made from colorfabbs xt(petg) and the tires from flexismart flexible rubber.

I didn't need a brim for them - but it an be useful if there is on;y a small area in contace with the print bed.

I don't use abs :-)

[iDig3Dprinting]

use a smaller nozzle diameter. adhesion to the print bed can be an issue so as @CuriousAardvark says, you may want to explore the use of a brim. We had to do this recently when printing out a molex seal, just couldn't get it to stick otherwise. We used ColorFabb nGen Flex for this. ( https://www.idig3dprinting.co.uk/new...abb-ngen-flex/ ).

The problems come if you need good definition. Printing lots of detail on a small model is obviously harder than just printing a small cube.

[Todd-67]

.2mm nozzle and slow your speed way down. if the part has fine details in the z direction a reduced layer height would be a benefit.

Your 245 degrees might be ok but it really depends on the filament itself. I am usually down around 230-235 but I print out a temperature test print every time I get a new roll to test what is best.

[curious aardvark]

be aware for slower print speeds you generally need to drop the temp a little.

How small are you talking ?

[Sabbath]

Here's the bit;
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...clip-size5.stl

Also I had read that ABS flexes before it breaks but this part seems quite brittle.

[Sabbath]

Your 245 degrees might be ok but it really depends on the filament itself. I am usually down around 230-235 but I print out a temperature test print every time I get a new roll to test what is best.

Can you explain this process a little further? What indicates the temperature is too high or low?

[Todd-67]

http://forums.designfutures.club/t/t...la-hips-etc/84
That is one example I don't make my tower that tall but under good light you can see the changes. Different colors can prefer different temps even from the same manufacturer.

[curious aardvark]

yeah I always had problems with abs breaking. I also found that pla was a lot more forgiving.

For something like that I'd probably use either pet-g or esun flexible pla. Both have much better layer adhesion than abs or pla, and that's going to be your weakpoint in that model.
Personally I'd put reinforcement on the inside of the gap between the two parts of the sticky-in-bit (must be a proper name for it lol)

Size wise, it's not that small - currently printing a much smaller batter cover :-)

[Sabbath]

Thanks curious. The idea was that the two bits would flex as they are pushed through the hole, so there's no reinforcement because those parts are supposed to flex. But I guess there will be stress concentration at the base, so i'll think about how to spread that out a bit. The clip is for a door trim in a car, so i thought PLA would not handle the temperature of the car sitting in the sun. If you think PLA could handle that i'll give it a try tho.